Joe Giebel, Poppulo

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT When I was buzzing around the InfoComm trade show earlier this year, I stopped at one stand for a chat, looked at the next stand over, and saw some familiar faces from Poppulo - the rebranded name for a company long known in digital signage industry circles as Four Winds Interactive. I went over and got caught up on what the company was up to and why it was showing at InfoComm, as I had grown in recent years to regard Poppulo - right or wrong - as being primarily focused on omnichannel workplace communications. I was mostly wrong, though I think it is fair to say that in the wake of a private-equity backed merger of Four Winds with an Irish company that did employee communications, there was marketing more noise for at least a while on the workplace side. David Levin, the co-founder and longtime CEO of Four Winds, stepped back from that role almost a year ago now, and I had been wanting to do a podcast with new CEO Ruth Fornell, whose background was well  outside the signage and workplace comms industries. After a preliminary chat, and me saying I'd poke away at her about digital signage stuff, she suggested I'd be in better hands with Joe Giebel, who has been with the company almost 20 years and is its Senior VP of Digital Signage. Joe and I get into a bunch of things in our chat, including the journey of blending technologies and culture, and the shifting needs and profiles of customers. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Joe, nice to catch up with you. It's been a while. Can you tell me what your role is at Poppulo?  Joe Giebel: Yeah, absolutely. My current role is Senior Vice President of Digital Signage, which is a fresh title for me. I'm coming out as a vice president of sales for America's role, where I've been fortunate to lead a number of our sales teams. For those who don't know Poppulo, there, a lot of the digital signage folks will probably know you or know the company more as Four Winds Interactive, but that changed, what about five, six years ago now?  Joe Giebel: That's right. I think we did that in 2021. So not too long ago, but, yeah, let me give a little bit of a history.  Four Winds Interactive was founded in 2005 as a digital signage company and remains so, but right around 2020, we started looking at different opportunities to enhance our offering, and made a couple of acquisitions. One of those was a company called Poppulo, which was the best-in-class enterprise, internal communications tool. So we brought them into the mix and when we did that, we started to look at the names, like how do we go to market and how do we want to do business as, and so we started doing market studies and it turns out that the name Poppulo, which loosely comes from a Latin term for the term “people” resonated and we decided to change the name to Poppulo. Four Winds Interactive serves as a parent company. We do business as Poppulo and the name Four Winds Interactive was always interesting and people wanted to know what's the origin of that name and its significance, and there wasn't a big story there. So I think we were open to considering a new brand and look and feel, and that's the story, Dave.  Yeah, if we go way, way back to almost 20 years ago, Four Winds kind of got its start with those little semi-electronic touch panels that you would play back samples of music, right? Joe Giebel: That is correct, and they were dealing with specialty media. So there was a company called, Four Winds Trading. That company was dealing with specialty media and a lot of it had to do with native tribes. So the Four Winds related there a little bit more. During that business, they started to think about how do we get loyalty around the distribution of our media titles and different things that we're distributing, and of course, screens were new at the time and media in an interactive format is very engaging, and so they were looking at